The Weblog of Erik J. Barzeski

I, Aaron Linville, am an official kernel hacker. In fact, if you are running Mac OS X (10.2.3) and viewing this webpage, you are using code that I've written. Of course you'll want proof of this, for that I have provided a PGP signed email from Apple.
There is no need to bow before my presence though (not that'd I object to it if you did). My contribution was infinitesimally small as compared to those of Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Braun or anyone else who has worked on Xnu.

I filed the original bugzilla report at the Open Darwin website on July 17th, 2002. I'm not sure the exact series of events that prompted me to write the actual patch. I had already checked the Xnu source out to apply the MAC Spoofing and verbose startup patches. I was also working on porting Hping3 to Darwin (which has the neat feature of calculating a remote hosts uptime via the TCP timestamp). I had tried it on my OpenBSD server and it hadn't worked so after I good bit of hunting around the source to both kernels I found out that it was merely a single line of code that made the difference. I figured I would post my patch at the appropriate place with little hope that it would be accepted. I more or less wanted to say that at least I had submitted something useful (albeit trivial) now that Apple is embracing open source.